Improving the energy efficiency of data-intensive applications running on clusters

Abstract

As an alternative to traditional computing architecture, cloud computing now is rapidly growing. However, it is based on models like cluster computing in general. Now supercomputers are getting more and more powerful, helping scientists have more indepth understanding of the world. At the same time, clusters of commodity servers have been mainstream in the IT industry, powering not only large Internet services but also a growing number of data-intensive scientific applications, such as MPI based deep learning applications. In order to reduce the energy cost, more and more efforts are made to improve the energy consumption of HPC systems. Because I/O accesses account for a large portion of the execution time for data intensive applications, it is critical to design energy-aware parallel I/O functions for addressing challenges related to HPC energy efficiency. As the de facto standard for designing parallel applications in cluster environment, the Message Passing Interface has been widely used in high performance computing, therefore, getting the energy consumption information of MPI applications is critical for improving the energy efficiency of HPC systems. In this work we first present our energy measurement tool, a software framework that eases the energy collection in cluster environment. And then we present an approach which can optimise the parallel I/O operation’s energy efficiency. The energy scheduling algorithm is evaluated in a cluster.